Mae Madden

CHAPTER XIII.

“Take me home,” said Mae again imploringly. “Not back there,” as Norman drew her hand through his arm and started for the hut, “O no, not even for a minute.”

“Sit here then,” he replied quietly, “while I arrange it with the woman,” and he walked quickly away. Mae watched him till he entered the low doorway, in a sort of subdued, glorified happiness, that would break out over her shame and fear. She was afraid he would hate her, at least she told herself so, but in reality, everything and everybody and every place were fast fading out of this eager little mind. She and Norman were together, and she could not help being content. There was a certain joy in her weakness and shame, though they were genuine and kept her hushed and silent.

Poor Lisetta was very much frightened, but told her story to this angry stranger with true Southern palaver. She said the little lady loved Italy so, and wanted to be a peasant, and insisted she would run away quite by herself if Lisetta would not take her, and so she consented, knowing she could, through the padrona, send word to the friends.

“And the man?” asked Norman, impatiently.

“What man? O, the officer. He just rode down this morning for a morning call. I never saw him before.”

A great weight, as large as the Piedmontese, fell from Norman’s heart then, and he scattered money among the children recklessly and ordered up the donkey; and smiled on the amazed Lisetta all in the same breath, and went back to help Mae into the wagon with the lightest kind of a heart. It was a strange ride they took back to Castellamare. I think they both wished the world could stand still once more. When they had arrived at the station they found the next train to Naples was not due for two hours. Norman left Mae in the waiting-room for a time. Through the window she watched Gaetano and the donkey start homeward, with a great sigh of relief. She had time while she was sitting to think, but her head was in too great a whirl. She could only feel sorry and ashamed and meek and happy, all mixed together. The sensation was odd.

“I have telegraphed Eric that we would start home by the next train, that you had only been off for a frolic. I hope we can buy a waterproof or shawl and a hat in Naples for you?”

“Yes,” said Mae, meekly, “I have my waterproof here. I think I will put it on now, please,” and she began nervously to untie the shawl strap. Norman put her fingers gently aside, and unbuckled it for her. He handed her the long deep-blue cloak, which she put tightly about her, drawing the hood over her head. “You look like a nun,” said Norman, smiling. “I wish I were one,” replied Mae, with a choke in her throat. She was growing very penitential and softened.

“What shall we do now?” asked Mr. Mann. “We have a long time to wait. If you feel like walking, we can find a pleasanter spot than this.”

“Go anywhere you please,” replied Mae meekly. “What is the matter with you?”—for Norman had a very amused expression in his brown eyes.

“I hardly recognize you. Not a trace of fight so far, and it must be two hours since we met.”

“Don’t,” said Mae, with her eyes down, so of course he didn’t, but the two just marched quietly along back on the Sorrento road towards some high rocks. They sat down behind these, with their faces towards the sea, and were as thoroughly hidden from view, as if they had been quite alone in the world.

“I suppose they were frightened,” asked Mae, “at home—at Rome, I mean.” “Dreadfully,” replied Norman, trying to be sober, but with the glad ring in his voice still. “Edith was for dragging the Tiber; she was sure you and the seven-branched candlestick lay side by side. Mrs. Jerrold searched your trunks and read all your private papers, I am morally certain.” Then Norman stopped abruptly, and Mae drew the long stiletto from her hair nervously and played with it before she said, “And the boys?” “Albert was very, very sad, but reasonably sure you would be found. We all feared the Italian, but Albert worked carefully, and soon discovered that the officer was said to be engaged to a young girl with whom he had been seen the day after you left, and that gave him courage,”—then Norman stopped again abruptly. “And Eric?” “Eric sat down with his face in his hands and cried, Miss Mae, and said, ‘I’ve lost my sister, the very dearest little sister in the world.’”

“And you came and found me,” said Mae, after a pause, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Yes, thank God,” said Norman. He was sober enough now. “Why did you do it?” asked Mae, “when I had been so naughty, and silly, and unkind?” He came very near telling her the reason as she looked up at him, but he did not, for she dashed on, “O! Mr. Mann, I have been—”

“Don’t confess to me, Miss Mae. Leave all of this till you get home to your own, who have a right to your confessions and penitence. Never mind what you have been, here you are, and as I have only one more handkerchief and your own looks as if it had been sea-bathing, you had better dry your eyes and be jolly for the next two hours.” This was a precarious speech, but Mae only laughed at it, and dried her eyes quickly. “But I have one thing to say to you,” she said, “and please mayn’t I?”

“You may say anything you please to me, of course,” replied this very magnanimous Norman.

“It is not about the miserable past or my doings, but it’s about the future. I’ve said good-bye to my dreams of life—the floating and waving and singing and dancing life that was like iced champagne. I’d rather have cold water, thank you, sir, for a steady drink, morning, noon and night. I’m going to be good, to read and study and grow restful,”—and Mae folded her hands and looked off toward the sea. “She’s a witching child,” thought Norman. Then she raised her head. “I said it lightly because I felt it deeply,” she added, as if in reply to his thought. “I am going to grow, if I can, unselfish and sympathetic, and perhaps, who knows, wise, and any way good.”

“There is no need of giving up your champagne entirely. Give yourself a dinner party now and then o’ holidays. The world is full of color and beauty, and poetry you love. All study is full of it—most of all it lives in humanity.”

“Well,” said Mae, “aren’t you glad I’m going to change so?”

“I’m glad you’re going to give your soul a chance. Your body has been putting it down hard of late.”

“It’s but a weakling,” said Mae, with a shake of her head, “and I’ve hardly heard its whimpers at all, but—O, Mr. Mann, if you could have seen Talila—she’s dreadful.”

“Who is Talila? and what has she to do with your soul?”

“O, she’s one of those Sorrento people,” replied Mae, as if she had lived there for years. “I have so much to tell you: it will take—”

“Years, I hope, dear.” The last word dropped without his noticing it, but Mae caught it and hid it in her heart.

“What made you think of coming for me?” she asked, after a pause, during which Norman had hummed a song as she had been writing her name on the sand. They were quite on the shore and only a narrow stretch of beach separated them from the bay. “You said if you ever came away, you would go to Sorrento, and I knew you had a friend in the kitchen who lived near Naples. So I searched for her and the padrona, and, finding neither of them, set Giovanni a babbling, and learned that the woman Lisetta had left that morning for Sorrento. I told the boys I had a mere suspicion that I would trace for them. So off I came last night, and by stopping and enquiring at every settlement, at last discovered you.”

“This is my birth-day; I am twenty years old,” said Mae, “Why, what are you doing?” For Norman had bent down to the sand also, and had drawn a queer little figure there.

“That is you when you were one year old,” he laughed, “and you could only crow and kick your small feet, and smile now and then, and cry the rest of the time.”

“That is about all I can do yet,” said Mae.

“Here comes number two,” and he drew his hand across the sand and smoothed the baby image away, leaving in its place a round, sturdy little creature, poised dangerously on one foot. “You have walked alone, and you have called your father’s name, and you’re a wonderful child by this time.”

“This is the three-year-old, white aprons and curls, please observe. Now, you recite ‘Dickery, dickery dock’ and ‘I want to be an angel,’ and you have cut all your wisdom teeth.”

“O, Mr. Mann, I haven’t cut them yet. Babies don’t have them.”

“Don’t they? Well, you have other teeth in their place, white and sharp—but by this time you are four years old.”

“Ah, here I begin to remember. You draw the pictures, and I’ll describe myself. Four years old!—let me see—I had a sled for Christmas, and I used to eat green apples. That’s all I can remember; and five and six years old were just the same.”

“O, no, I’m sure you went to church for the first time somewhere along there; and isn’t that a noteworthy event? I suppose all your thoughts were of your button boots and your new parasol?”

“I behaved beautifully, I know; mamma says so; sat up like a lady, while you were sleeping, on that very same Sunday, off in some little country church, I suppose.”

“I shouldn’t wonder—sleeping in my brother’s outgrown coat into the bargain, with the sleeves dangling over my little brown hands.”

“It doesn’t seem as if they could ever have been very little, does it, Mr. Mann?”

Mr. Mann unfolded five fingers and a thumb and surveyed them gravely for a moment. “It is strange that this once measured three inches by two and couldn’t hit out any better than your’s could.”

Mae had laid her hand on her knee and was looking at it also in the most serious manner. Now she doubled it into a small but very pugnacious looking fist, which she shook most entrancingly before the very eyes of the young man by her side. The eyes turned such a peculiar look upon her that she hastened to add: “Go on with your dissolving views. It is number eight’s turn next. You are the showman, and I am interested spectator.”

“You insist upon describing my pictures, so I think you are properly first assistant to the grand panorama. Here’s eight-year-old. Try your powers on her.”

“Let me see. O, then I read all the while, the ‘Fairchild Family’ and ‘Anna Ross,’ and I used to wear my hair in very smooth braids, I remember. I was ever so good.”

“Impossible; you must have forgotten,” suggested Norman. “You surely whispered in school and committed similar dreadful crimes. Poor little prig.”

“No, don’t,” plead Mae; “please don’t laugh at the little girl me. I love to think of her as so goody-goody. Last night,” and Mae lowered her voice, “I seemed to see little Mae Madden kneeling down in the old nursery in her woolly wrapper saying her prayers,” and Mae brought up on the prayers very abruptly, and bent over toward the sand and began to draw hastily. “Here comes nine-year-old Mae. Mr. Mann, you may do the describing.”

“O, I suppose there were doll’s parties, first valentines, and rides with Albert in his buggy, when you clung very tightly to the slight arm of the carriage and smiled very bravely up in his face. You must have been pretty then.”

“No, I was dreadfully ugly. I had broken out two teeth climbing a stone wall.”

“You had stopped being good?”

“Yes, that only lasted a little bit of a time.”

“Miss Mae, I’m sure you were never ugly, but naughty and silly, I dare say. Kept a diary now, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and went to sleep with Eliza Cooke’s poems under my pillow every night, and my finger holding the book open at some such thrilling verse as this:

         ‘Say on that I’m over romantic
           In loving the wild and the free,
          But the waves of the dashing Atlantic,
           The Alps and the eagle for me.’”
 

“Did you wear your hair plaited when you were ten years old?” enquired Norman, intensely busy with another drawing.

“O no; I didn’t do anything when I was ten years old but get mad and make up with my two dearest friends.”

“One of whom was your dearest friend one-half of the time and the other the rest of it, I suppose.”

“Don’t be satirical, sir. I had a lover when I was eleven; I used to skate with him and write him little notes, folded very queerly.”

“Why do you draw twelve and thirteen with their heads down?” asked Mae, after a moment.

“Because they read so much; everything they can get hold of, including, possibly, a very revised edition of ‘Arabian Nights’?”

“Yes,” laughed Mae, “and my first novel, ‘Villette.’”

“You go to a play for the first time now,” suggested Norman. “How you clasp your hands and wink your eyes and bite your lips! And next day, in front of your mother’s pier-glass, how you scream ‘O, my love,’ and gasp and tumble over in a heap in your brown calico, as the grand lady did the night before, in her pink silk.”

“Brown calico, indeed! I never condescended to die in my own clothes, let me assure you. The garret was overhauled, and had been since I was a mere baby, for effective, sweeping garments. Let us hurry along over fourteen and fifteen. I was sentimental and tried to be so young-ladyish then. I used to read history with Albert, and always put on both my gloves when I started out, and had great horror of girls who talked loud in the street. I learned to make bread, and shirt bosoms, and such things.”

“Well, here you are in a long dress, Miss Sweet Sixteen. I remember you home from boarding school on a vacation.”

“What did you think of me?” asked Mae, “didn’t we have a nice time that summer? O, how silly I was!”

She hurried on, because the eyes had given her that peculiar look again, which put her heart in a tremble. “I did have a beautiful time at boarding school,” she continued, “the darlingest principal and such girls.”

“Then I suppose you wrote a salutatory in forlorn rhyme to end off with,” laughed Norman, “and read it, all arrayed in white, in a trembling voice, and everybody applauded, and even old Judge Seymour admired it, while you were reading, with your pink cheeks and trembling hands and quivering voice.”

“Abominable! I didn’t have the salutatory, and the girl who did, read a superb one, as strong and masculine—”

“Then the Judge went to sleep, I’m sure,” declared Norman.

“Well,” said Mae, “you are leaving out two years,” for Norman had leaned back against the rock with his arms folded.

“By and by,” said Norman, “we all come off to Europe, and some of us go through the heart-ache, don’t we?”

“Yes,” replied Mae, softly.

“But come out ahead one day at Sorrento, perhaps?” asked Norman. To which Mae made no direct reply.

“All the Mae Maddens have faded away,” she said, looking down at the sand again. “The tide is rising.” And she walked forward to the ripples of water, and then came slowly back and stood before Norman seriously. He laughed.

“Why, Mr. Mann,” said Mae, “I have been so very, very wicked.”

The dreadful Mr. Mann only laughed again.

“You act as if it were all a joke. I never saw you so merry before.”

“I have never been as happy before in my life.”

“Why?” asked Mae, in a low voice.

“Because I have found you,” he answered earnestly, and before she knew it Mae was lifted in the strong, manly arms, her pink cheek close to Norman’s brown one, and his lips on hers. She leaned her face against his and clung tightly to him,

“O, Mr. Norman Mann,” she said, “do you really want me as much—as I do you?”

And Norman, still holding her tightly, bent his hand, with hers clasped in it, to the sand, and after the Mae Madden, he wrote another name, so that it read:

MAE MADDEN MANN.

Then he said a great many, many things, all beginning with that electric, wonderful little possessive pronoun “my,” of which he had discoursed formerly, and he held her close all the while, and they missed the next train for Naples.

The gay peasant costume fell about the girl’s round lithe form like the luxuriant skin of some richly marked animal; but out of her eyes looked a woman’s tender, loving, earnest soul. Norman Mann had saved her.